What fun, on a cold day, to make a tiktok of my ethnic ancestresses, as revealed to me by DNA, finding beautiful pictures of different ancient cultures. As I did say, it is by DNA that I have found out so much about my ancestresses. Three quarters of my DNA is Celtic, for my family being Welsh, Irish and Scottish, and Viking I have a lot too, for having family from the Shetland Islands. Archeogenetics has revealed descent from the ancient Balari tribe of Sardinia and the Vascones tribe of the Basque. I have around 4% Greek DNA, 3% Spanish, 2% Italian, 3% central Asian and 1% Finnish. My matriarchal origins have come from the Caucasus mountains. How beautiful those pictures I gathered together. So this was a joy for me.
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I can't resist it, to get stuck into some genealogy researching. I'm curious to see if I can find any more clues to some gypsy heritage. There are hints, but no certainties. I did a read up about gypsies, both Irish and swarthy easterners, but I'm none the wiser. Maxteds were many in Kent, and one I can see was a farmer, very much a settled profession. One Maxted stole from a Kingsnorth in Pluckley, the Kingsnorth's being the family of my friends Jeremy and Ian, for which he was sentenced to transportation to Australia. One of my great Aunts, Selina Maxted, eloped to America with a cousin, being pregnant by him and having two daughters out there before returning. She never married. I want to find out more on this story, but fail to find records so far. Selina's brother was my ancestor George, the one who died falling off a haybale, being pierced by a stick into his entrails. If I was a superstar on Who Do You Think You Are, they'd whip out the whole story, no problem, and for sure tell me if there was or was not gypsy blood. It's interesting that I do have Mediterranean DNA, for so do gypsy descendants, their Indian traces being oft watered down and out. It's also interesting that I can feel so at home in these warmer foreign lands. I am not such a stranger to these places after all. Back to researching, I found out more about my many times great Aunt Selina. Her cousin Edward was a bricklayer who died when they were back in London, after their few years in New York, maybe after a bankruptcy, after which Selina put an advert in the papers looking for a position caring in homes or offices. As revealed by the next census, she and her remaining daughter, the first also having died in London, both found work as family nurses. So, Selina, yes, she does sound interesting somehow, a single mother who had a stint in New York. And I was looking at my ancestress, Elizabeth Mugway of Stalisfield, who got into the papers as an old widow. By marriage she was Elizabeth Roberts. It was her husband, Charles Roberts, who is said to have been of a gypsy family, the Otterden gypsy Roberts. Elizabeth was in the papers for having been neighbour to a murder victim, Hannah Giles, killed by a man, Samuel Seager, who obsessively stalked Hannah while her husband was out rat catching with his dogs and ferrets. Elizabeth was well acquainted with both Hannah and her killer Samuel. Rumour was that this fellows obsession was borne from an affair which she had no wish to continue. That very morning Samuel had visited Elizabeth and she'd told him he was a 'queer fellow'. He warmed himself by her fire, while spying through the window on Hannah's house to be sure the husband had gone out. He then called on Hannah with the excuse he wanted her to stitch him some trousers. He was a shoemaker and sometimes she would bind his shoes for him. Having heard the rumours, Hannah's husband, Stephen Giles, had confronted Samuel and told him he was no longer welcome in the family home. Hannah made her sons stay by her whenever Samuel was around, but he got her alone when that evening she was off along the country road to babysit the children of a nearby farmer. He mercilessly slit her throat with a razor, shot her in the thighs and set her on fire. Such are the potential deeds of a stalker who who finds himself attracted yet thwarted by a lone vulnerable woman. Elizabeth and other neighbouring women sobbed their eyes swollen from distress at the killing of their friend and they robed themselves in black. The bakehouse they shared was where Hannah's body was lain, naked and burnt, all the locals and even strangers coming to view her. In one paper a map was drawn showing who lived in what cottage and the spot where Hannah had been found dead. Elizabeths cottage is marked, being the first homestead through a shared gate and across the gardens of the families. Hannahs house was the end one of a row of three, the bakehouse they shared being on the other end. As Elizabeth had been a frequent caller to Hannah's, she must have been party to Hannah's fears. And yet all else in the village had thought Samuel such a harmless man. After the killing Samuel went on the run, later to be found in another county, hungry and looking for work on the railroad, using another name, saying that he was of the Roberts family. He was recognised by a description in the papers, confessed, and was sentenced to execution. They'd 'had words' was the reason he gave for her death. Looking again at Maxteds, I found that Charles Maxteds marriage to Sarah Green, and I'd never noticed this before, though one just had to switch to the next page to see, a double marriage, the same time as his sister Sarah married her own amour. Sarah, the sister of Charles, had already had two illegitimate children, one while she herself was but a young teenager, and for respect of the second child, she had been in church about to marry, the record having begun to be written, only for it not to go ahead, not till these years later with another child now on the way. It sounds Eastenderish, dumped at the altar! Oh, the stories of the past, if we but knew them. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. On checking my emails, I saw that at last my Genographic results were through, oh my, how exciting. And so I found out that I was 1.2% Neanderthal, and just to know that was a joy, and my mtDNA type now had a more sophisticated classification, rather than just being a non-Jewish N1b. It was now an N1b1A2A, a haplogroup which remains a mystery and which being so rare is unresearched - no nearer to it being pinned down to a specific location then. As for my autosomal admixture I am found to be, in total of all components of my DNA, 48% British and Irish, 38% Viking Scandinavian, much of which will be owing to my Shetland Island ancestry, and this also being particularly more than general people of Britain and even Scotland have, 11% Southern European (Mediterranean), and 3% Central Asian. What?! OK, well, aligning this to my genealogy then may be a little confusing. For as far as I can understand the 11% equates to a great grandparent, which means that one of mine then is almost full Italian, Spanish or Greek, and yet according to what I know of my family how can that be. And as far as the 3% Central Asian, that would equate to one of my great great great grandparents. Now if, for instance, this had been where Maria Harrison got her black hair, alabaster complexion and twinkling eyes, then that would be because her mother was fully central Asian. And this is where I begin to wish the location information was more specific and that some raw data had been supplied, which I could over time analyse, but it had not. All was quite pretty but vague, and the zonal areas are so vast. Now, if Maria's mother, Eleanor Caroline Barton, was from west of the Caspian Sea in the classification zone, that would make some sense, in aligning with the Caucasus mountains, or even if south of there, as far down as Armenia. But the zone I'd been appointed was east of the Caspian Sea and north of Tibet, the area of the various 'S'tans', Kazakhstan, Turkestan, etc, historically being of the old Silk Route. Although confusing, this is also exciting and suitably exotic to appeal to me. All was much on my mind throughout the night. It doesn't seem to make sense unless I stray from the map I've so far laid down genealogically. Because I do have Eleanor Caroline Barton's genealogy going further back and all remains English sounding. So one wonders, had a foreign child been brought into the family and adopted as if their own. And as for the maybe Italian or other Mediterranean type great grandparent, I end up thinking of one other possibility, on account of my nanny Eileen's parents only having married when her mother Florence Maxted was nine months pregnant, and with her husband Percy's family having been very lax to accept her: could a Mediterranean seaman, sojourning at the seaport pub where Florence worked as a barmaid, have got her pregnant and then sailed away, never to return. Looking at this DNA result it does now seem quite a possibility. Really, I am stuck when it comes to find out more or being sure of anything. I did dream in the night that my mother was me and I asked her to take the Genographic test too, for then I could make more sense of all, by knowing which half of my autosomal DNA is from her and which from my father. But she had no interest in such things and would not do it. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. |
AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. Categories
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